Since the installation of Wheezy, I’ve been struggling to find a good and reliable desktop environment. From Gnome 3 to XFCE to LXDE and back to XFCE. Still, some of the things just didn’t work as I wanted it to be. A few weeks ago I learnt that Debian’s Wheeze-backports have provided the Mate Desktop package. It’s a fork from Gnome 2 which is the best Linux desktop environment I’ve ever used, so I decided to give it a try (I did try Mint Linux with Mate desktop for a short while quite some time ago). It’s been a few weeks using the Mate desktop and I’m very happy with it except one thing: the sound will be muted when lowering the volume to 0% but it won’t be unmuted by increasing the volume. I’ll have to fire up the “Sound Preferences” to unmute the audio device. After some googling, the solution is easy:

aptitude install mate-media-pulse mate-settings-daemon-pulse

The two packages will replace the mate-media-gstreamer and mate-settings-daemon-gstreamer installed.